Voice mail systems receive, store, and retrieve voice messages for called parties. Voice messages are stored to and retrieved from disk, electronic, or other storage media. The messages are streamed to the user as they are retrieved.
Voice mail systems are often centralized in a network to allow efficient access by users. Such systems rely on centralized processors to change the playback speed of the voice stream while minimizing variation to the speech characteristics. As the voice stream is played faster, the centralized control reads the voice message faster from media storage to maintain a steady flow of the voice stream and processes the voice message to ameliorate any deleterious changes due to the faster playback. Such reliance on centralized processor resources, however, is often not practical for modern voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) systems.